Egg, Cheese and Toast, Mumbai Style

Mumbai is a city of great egg dishes — hard-boiled curries and frankies, wrestler’s omelets and masala scrambles. Eggs Kejriwal is just one dish in its vast canon. This egg-and-cheese toast isn’t new, but it’s newly internationally famous, like a stage actor cast in a superhero film. I found my way to it last year at Paowalla in Manhattan — an egg with a warm, tender yolk under a fat blanket of melted cheese, smudged with bright green chutney. Jet-lagged, on deadline, I was restored by it again at Dishoom in London, a chain inspired by Mumbai’s old Irani cafes, where they grill the cheese until it’s golden and put two runny eggs on top.

By then, I was a believer in this trinity of toast, egg and cheese, blessed with the raw heat of green chiles. It was a reliable fix for hangovers, solid enough to pass for breakfast but compact enough to snack on between meals. I made it at home after a long, inadequate restaurant dinner, kneeling in front of my broiler to keep an eye on the bubbling Cheddar, wondering where this stodgy little dreamboat had been all my life.

The answer is precise: Until recently, eggs Kejriwal belonged only to South Mumbai. The dish had a local fan base, but was mostly unknown outside it. “Honestly, I never heard of it when I was growing up,” said the chef Preeti Mistry, who adapted eggs Kejriwal for her weekend brunch menu at Juhu Beach Club in Oakland. Mistry’s version is a glorious, maximalist mash-up with a croque-madame. She adds slices of bacon, dusting them with the same spices her kitchen uses to make chai, and layers the meat with eggs, Monterey Jack cheese and serranos.

Though it sounds a bit like diner fare, eggs Kejriwal was born about 50 years ago on Mumbai’s exclusive social-club circuit. The original is still available at the Willingdon Sports Club, where a former member named Devi Prasad Kejriwal requested an egg-and-cheese toast cooked his way so frequently that they put it on the menu and named it after him.

“The original had a sort of essential simplicity,” said Vikram Doctor, a food writer for India’s Economic Times. “It’s just toast and a poached egg, and a slice of processed cheese. It’s not fancy.” But he noticed variations popping up on more and more menus in Mumbai, and on social media. Doctor first wrote about the Kejriwal phenomenon five years ago, when he formed a theory that its sudden, viral growth might be tied to the rise of a Delhi politician who shared its name, Arvind Kejriwal. “The incongruity of this dish, also named Kejriwal — it’s a silly joke really.”

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CreditGentl and Hyers for The New York Times. Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Amy Wilson.

Across India, the egg occupies an interesting position. Not meaty enough to be considered meat but not vegetal enough for everyone to agree that it’s vegetarian. “Eggs seem to fall in some odd limbo,” Doctor said. And the irresistible mythology of eggs Kejriwal relies on that limbo. Kejriwal, the club member, was a vegetarian. He also belonged to India’s Marwari community, who traditionally don’t eat eggs, and while he did not want to be seen out and about eating them, cheese was just fine. So kitchens hid eggs for him under cover of cheese and chiles.

You could be true to the original, but being true to the original is overrated. And if you put the egg down first on the toast, then in an effort to thoroughly melt the cheese on top of it, you may accidentally cook the yolk through. It’s better if it runs. So instead, I smear the toasted bread with mustard, mix grated Cheddar with a little chopped red onion, green chiles and cilantro, and leave it all under the noisy, clacking broiler at the bottom of my oven. After a couple of minutes, the cheese is melted and just starting to bubble, and the edges of the toast are even more browned. I could stop here, I know, and sit down with a perfectly good chile-cheese toast, but that’s what I used to do before I knew about eggs Kejriwal. There is no going back.